Some Wounds Heal Slower
by xooxu
Summary: The year between isn't easy, but they both knew it wouldn't be. Pike is learning to handle the fact that he'll never move under his own power again, and Kirk is ignoring everything that comes with dying.
1. Chapter 1

You try to breathe, but it doesn't quite feel right. Nothing feels right.

You can remember the meeting. It's fuzzy and fluid, but you can at least remember Jim showing off, like the brat always does, you really need to talk some sense into that kid, but then. It gets all gray and slippery. You think you remember the piercing blue of Jim's eyes, somewhere in the mess, but you can't be sure if that's real or not.

You're almost positive that the memory of Jim's lips pressed against yours is a hallucination.

You try to take more air into your lungs, and this time your can feel the tube. It blocks your tongue from touching the roof of your mouth, and you can feel it pressing against the back of your throat. You can hear the mechanic rush of air being pumped into your lungs.

Only, you can't feel the rise and expanse of your chest.

And then you realize that you can't feel much of anything at all.

You blink your eyes open, but it doesn't happen like you expect it to. It's slower, delayed. You can feel the effort it takes for your muscles to respond. Like trying to move your toes in a way they aren't used to moving, like learning how to control a new keypad for the first time, like you're relearning everything again.

The brightness of the room makes it hard to see, and you try to close your eyes again. Your entire face feels sluggish and slow.

You hear a beeping, slow and lethargic, but irregular. You try to turn your head, but despite the expectation of slowly lifting your head and looking to your right, nothing happens. And it gives you, not for the first time in your long life, an out of body experience.

"... Chris?" a groggy, gravelly voice asks, and at first, you can't place whom it belongs to. You try to move your head again, move anything, but the only thing you feel moving are your eyelids as they blink.

"Oh, god, Chris?" This time, the voice is alert, albeit still gravelly with the sound of sleeplessness, and you have no question who it is. Jim comes into view, leaning over you. "Can you hear me? Are you awake?"

You try to say something to him, but nothing is working. Your body isn't responding. You hear the length of time between the slow beeps decrease. You want to give him a sign, but you can only stare, following him as closely as you can, and hope it's enough.

"Oh my god, Chris!" Jim faulters, and you see something so close to tears well up in his eyes. He looks away, frantic and hurried, and then pulls back out of your small range of vision. "Oh god, where is that call ... Jesus, Chris, I thought I lost you."

He finally grabs something, fumbling with it as he moves into a corner of your vision. You hear a longer, louder beep echo in the room, and then a tinny voice ask, "Nurse Arise here, do you need help?"

"Oh god, Christopher Pike is awake."

**&break&**

You were in a coma for twenty-seven days, the doctor tells you, standing at the foot of your bed so you can see her from your position propped up on the bed. You can see Jim still out the corner of your eye. You think he's holding your hand, but you can't feel it.

You have some severe spinal damage and mild brain trauma from three phaser shots, along with numerous other injuries that are already on their way to healing. The coma you were in was naturally occurring, and they weren't sure what sort of shape you would be in when and if you woke up. You're brain appears to be functioning almost normally, and your brain waves look healthy, according to her readings.

She tells you lots of things, but she isn't talking to you really. She looks at Jim more often than you, and she even starts to address him directly as the speech – because it isn't a conversation – progresses.

They want to do about a million and ten things to you, starting with a full brain scan and analysis, and then some additional tests and an evaluation and then this then that.

"But first things first," she says, smiling kindly at you, looking you square in the eye. "I'm sure Captain Kirk here would like to talk to you a little. So we'll start bright and early in the morning at 7. Try to get some sleep, too, Captain," she says, collecting her charts and walking towards the door.

After she is gone, you listen to the pumping of your breathing machine, and the now steady beeps of your heart. Jim sighs.

"You were gone, Chris."

And Jim tells you everything. The attack. How you were brain dead at first. Admiral Marcus's special assignment. The torpedoes. Kronos. John Harrison. Khan. The Vengeance. Nearly dying. Twice. Losing the Vengeance to Khan. The Enterprise dying. Dying. Coming back. Learning that Khan had destroyed most of Star Fleet Academy. Learning that you weren't really brain dead. Waiting and waiting and waiting. Until you finally woke up.

It's actually almost seven, you can see by the clock on the wall, when Jim finishes telling his story. "I was so scared, Chris," he whispers from somewhere near your chest. You can't see him.

You wish you could talk so you could tell him to go to sleep.

**&break&**

The wheelchair sucks.

It's not that it's any more uncomfortable than the rest of your life has become. It even isn't really about what it means, now, because at least it's better than being pushed everywhere by someone else. It's how you look.

The physical therapy room has lot of weights and equipment in it, along with a large carpeted empty area in the middle of the room. You feel grateful that you're facing the row of large windows, over looking the city, instead of the wall of mirrors opposite them.

"You're doing great Chris. Now, just like Dr. Malibirch told you ..." the physical therapist keeps repeating. You won't start working on speech therapy for another month, but you really wish there was someway you could communicate to her that you want her to _shut up_.

The chair veers right, and you notice it immediately, causing it lurch too far left as you try to compensate. The young nurse holds out her hand, palm forward, and the chair stops before you can go too far.

"Good, good! You tried to correct it on your own that time. Let's try again. Just slow and straight at me."

You would sigh if you could, but the oxygen pump still loudly reminds you that your breathing rate is still being controlled and monitored. The team of doctors that watch as you think into large machines all believe that you may eventually regain control of your breathing rate, and possibly even your vocal cords, but you're still a long way away from that.

You start again, thinking straight. You know it sounds odd, "thinking straight," but it's the best way you've been able to focus on the sensation that the doctors told you to isolate.

The entire process has been extremely touch-and-go with the brain scanners, and it all depends on your ability to recreate a brainwave closely enough for the miniature scanner on your head to notice. So far, the doctors have only identified three neuron patterns: thinking straight, thinking right, and thinking left. You have to think about the memory of walking, or of traveling straight. The scanner sometimes is finicky about which it will take, if you have to recall and consentrate on the feeling of walking, or if just a general sense of movement will be enough to move. Dr. Malibirch has told you that the scanners will learn with you, that that's what they've been programmed to do, and that eventually, you will just be able to move without concentrating like this. But you are skeptical. You mean, you have been at this for a month already.

You get distracted thinking about this process, and the chair slow to a halt.

The physical therapist smiles reassuringly again, about to say something, but she is cut off by a knock coming from your left.

You are extremely surprised when the chair rotates left on its own, apparently catching on to whatever thought you had about turning to look.

"Hey hotshot," Jim says, leaning against the aluminum doorframe. "Just wanted to check up on you before I have to go."

You wish you could you could tell him to go to that meeting already, you're fine, and he's just wasting time like you both know he is, but you can't. You just blink three times, the sign for _yes_ or _okay_. You think he understands.

He smiles at the code, warm yet small, before looking at the nurse. "How's he doing?"

"Doing really well, actually. A little grumpy this morning, I think. Maybe seeing you might cheer him up a bit."

Jim laughs, stepping into the room and walking closer. "Well, I know it cheered me up." He leans down so that you can look him in the eye before saying, "Don't be too big of a pain in the ass for Marlene, yeah? She's only trying to help."

You blink twice, slowly, _no_, and Jim laughs loudly, standing back up. You can see him lean in closer briefly. You register that he kisses your forehead, but you don't quite feel it. It's more memory than actual sensation, even though you do feel something. But the soft sound is enough to reassure you of the reality of it.

"Love ya," he whispers, then says slightly louder, "I'll be back at 12:30." He turns and leaves, and even if you could move to look away, you still would have watched him walk out the door, turning slightly to throw a wave and a goodbye at both you and the nurse.

"He loves you a lot, you know that?" the nurse asks you, slightly distracted. You try to get the chair to swivel right again, but it's slower and jerkier this time.

"Good, good, Chris!" the nurse says, quickly noticing your efforts. She doesn't get up to help like she would have earlier this week. Her absent tone is long gone now, and by the time you can see her face, she's all work and seriousness in her expression. But you know that if you had been able to see her face after Jim walked out the door, you would have seen that longing you've seen on many a young woman's face. Longing and sympathy.


	2. Chapter 2

You wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. Your nightmares have been getting worse, but you don't know how to tell anyone about them.

You try to breathe, but its hard. You blink up at the dark celing of the hospital room. It's probably something like three in the morning, but you don't check. You've had a lot of late nights anyway.

The ventilator is loud at work in the corner, slow rythmic hissing and groaning coming from your left. The doctors say that it might not aways be needed, but it's still here to stay for a while. It took you a long time to get used to the sound of it, constantly going. It's easier during the day to ignore it, when there's other noises and things to focus on and do. You can actually forget about it pretty easily then. But at night, when it's quiet, you just listen to the sound of it, pumping air in and out, in and out, and it reminds you that Christopher Pike is still alive.

You look over at the admiral, now. You think he's asleep, but it's hard to see in the dark of the room. "Lights, five percent," you ask of the computer, and the celing starts to glow, and you can easily see that Chris is awake, eyes open and staring up at the celing.

"Hey.." you whisper to him, getting up out of your sleeper arm chair and moving where he can see you. "Why are you awake?" you ask rhetorically, knowing that he can't answer you. You just want to show your concern.

His bed is always set at an angle, so that he's sitting up somewhat. It's not very big, only slightly larger than a twin, but it's big enough that you can sit on the edge. "I didn't wake you did I?"

He blinks three slow blinks. _Yes_.

"Was I talking in my sleep?"

Five blinks. _Yes and no._

You furrow your brow. "Screaming?"

Two blinks. _No._

You sigh. You didn't think your dreams were that bad. "Just murmuring, then?"

_Yes._

"... Have you had any nightmares?"

_Yes._

What about, you wonder, but you don't want to bring it up to him tonight.

He told you about one nightmare he had, once while you were asleep in his bed. It was about the bug that Nero had used, and the truths that he told. He used to think that telling those secrets was one of the worst things that had happened that day. He had been prepared to die, to be tortured. He hadn't expected that anything they tried would work.

You wonder if he still dreams about the bug, or if he's got worse things to plague his nightmares now.

"... Should I tell you about my dream?" you ask, watching his ice blue eyes carefully.

_Yes._

You dreamt about dying. You do that a lot, now. Mostly it's about the pain, the last raggedy breath and how it burned, almost a relief to not have to take another. Sometimes you dream about the sickening, blanching feeling you felt when you started to wake up. You know now that it was a combonation of the cocktail of medicines inside of you, plus your own irrational fear of whatever came next.

Sometimes you dream of Spock's eyes, and your hands against the glass. Some nights you can't stop thinking about Khan's blood being inside of you. It often warps your dreams, turning you into him. One night you dreamt that he was trapped inside of you, crawling his way out through your mouth. That was a gross one.

Some nights you don't dream about your death at all, but about Chris's death. Sometimes he lives, paralyzed or in a coma, too. But most nights he dies in your arms, like you had thought, had feared he had when it happened, and he lay motionless, not even breathing.

Some nights you dream that none of this ever happened. Those nights, the nightmare isn't in the dream, but it's there when you wake up.

You tell Chris all about your nightmares, looking out the window at the twinkling lights of San Francisco. You want to watch his face, his eyes, you know you should. But you find it easier to look at the skyline, moving and changing and reacting, than to look at Chris's stoic face.

You fall asleep, laying haphazardly along the side of the bed, legs dangling off the side, with your hand wrapped around Chris's limp one.

**&break&**

You watch quietly as the nurse – a young, attractive Deltan that throws you a curious glance – gives Chris his hypos. You think he's new, the nurse, because you've never seen him in this wing before, and you know most of the night shift by now, along with a good deal of the day shift.

"I'm sorry, but I have to ask. Are you _the_ Captain Kirk?" he asks as he fishes out the last hypo from the preassembled kit. The last two are always nutrient shots, which he takes every morning at seven and night at eight. He can't eat solid food anymore due to his ventilator, so now it's all injected via hypos. The shots are full of more vitamins than he normal needs, and a careful balance of calories that are calculated automatically by his daily schedule.

"Why yes, I am. I don't think we've met yet, Nurse ...?"

"Tam. And no, I've just transferred from the pediatric neural wing."

"Nice to meet you, Tam."

"You too, Captain..."

He bites his lip, eyes down, pretending to be focused on his work, after he finishes with the last hypo. You honestly try not to pay him any mind, just hoping that he'll pack up and leave without embarrassing himself.

Chris is awake, you can see, by the soft flutter of his eyelids. They're closed, mostly, but occasionally they move, lashes twitching.

"So, um. I've heard you're here a lot? Are you two close?" the nurses asks, shying a glance at you before trips over putting the used hypos away.

You briefly wonder if none of the nurses bothered to tell him, or if he never thought to ask them, maybe.

_We're together,_ you want to tell him, but for some reason you stop yourself. You still haven't given Starfleet an official account of yours and Chris's relationship, nor have you actually admitted it out loud to anyone since the attack. Everyone knows, you know, now. Some of your crew knew before, anyway, like Bones and probably Spock, but you think they all know now. You haven't asked to check, though. But even Vice Admiral No'Vazh appears to be looking the other way when it comes to your obvious stay at the hospital. But to be honest, you have been consciously waiting to cross that bridge when it came.

"We're together." You finally say it, as calmly and smoothly as you can, looking Nurse Tam in the eye. He blinks, and you wonder briefly if the deer-in-headlights look is a cultural or natural part of his physiology.

"Oh!" he says, softly.

You look away, back to Chris, while the nurse fumbles over getting his kit back in order and hurrying out the door with the cart he walked in with, a blush on his neck.

Chris's eyes are open when you look back to him. You don't know if he can see you from where you are, but you know he can hear you.

"Was that okay?" you ask, whispering to him.

He responds with three blinks. _Yes._

**&break&**

"Just think _'noooooo.'_ Think like you're going to say the word."

You think that that might be the most ludicrous advice you've ever heard, but Chris doesn't blink twice this time, he universal code for _something is wrong_ or _no_. You took it as _"I don't have any clue what you're talking about,"_ when he blinked the first time they told him to focus on the sound of the metallic voice.

But Chris doesn't blink again now, and that's generally a good sign. You think he's still a little frustrated, but you honestly can't tell. He still can't move his face accept to blink, and even his eyelids sag a little under their own weight most of the time.

"Good, good," Dr. Lizzie Malibirch whispers, eyes focused on the display of Chris's brain. She moves something on the display, and the robot vowel stops. "That was really good, Chris. We're going to try it a couple more times, just for consistency's sake, but whatever you were doing was clear and precise."

Dr. Malibirch used to call him Admiral Pike all the time, until he started blinking twice every time she would say it. At first, you didn't know what he was trying to say, and you would have to play guessing games with him, asking him yes or no questions. _"Does something hurt?" Two blinks. "Are you confused about something?" Two blinks. "Do you need something." Five blinks, yes and no, sort of. "Something I can do...?"_

You felt triumphant in a way when you finally figured it out, so happy that you had been able to communicate with him like that. To be honest, you're not sure how much of the Chris you knew before is in there, but in moments like that, when he insists that the doctors stop calling him Admiral Pike, just Chris, you can believe it's still _your_ Chris in there.

"Okay, one more time, Chris," Dr. Malibirch says as the robot voice starts up again, repetitions of the word _no_ drawn out. _Noooooo. Noooooo. Noooooo..._ It makes you think of a robotic murder scene, cold and detached voice crying out for help. You want to laugh a little at the thought.

But then you remember that this is going to be Pike's voice, at least for a while, so you try not to think like that.

You're sitting in a hard plastic chair in the exam room. You had to do some minor persuading at first for them to let you sit in wherever Chris goes. Even though you are listed as his emergency contact, which gets you almost all the visitation rights a family member would have, the still didn't want you with him during these brain scans. All it took to convince them was Chris blinking his eyes twice, and you taking the time to figure out that he was saying he wanted you with him. You think that it has more to do with your ability to understand and think like him than he desire to have you with him.

The robotic voice stops once more, and Chris is praised for his work. You're not currently in his line of sight, but you want to smile at him, just to let him know you're there for him. So you say teasingly, "Pretty soon you're gonna be like Peter. 'No, no, nooooo.'" You laugh a little to let him know it's a joke.

Chris turns his chair so that he can look at you, and you smile widely at him with the shit-eating grin you know he loves to hate. The chair starts forward, but then quickly reverses, something that he's been working on since he mastered turning smoothly. You realize quickly that he's pretending to charge you, like a bull, and you cackle at him. "You wanna take this outside, old man?" you ask him, throwing up your fists comically.

"Behave, you two, or else I throw you guys in the time-out room on the fifteenth floor," Dr. Malibirch warns, casting both of you a playful warning glance. "And that's where we send the terrible twos to throw tantrums."

Chris turns back to face her, blinking three times. She's looking at the display, but she smiles and nods anyway. "Good boy."

**&break&**

_"You think funny you."_ The robot voice from Pike's chair tells you as you prattle away with him jokingly about your first trip to H'Bautek, the man-eating whore planet. His vocabulary has grown tremendously in the past two weeks, quicker than Dr. Malibirch was expecting. Although it will take the program a lot longer, maybe years, to fully master syntax and grammar fluently – because the way the program works and the way people talk normally are very different, so you've been told – the introduction of this communication. Bones said that there is more cutting edge stuff out there based on inter-species translators, but that it's still best to learn the basics first.

Still, you've grown to love the robotic voice. It means more freedom for Chris, and the ability to express his ideas without having to play twenty questions with you every time. _"Shh and movie." _

"Yeah, yeah," you say, snuggling into the comfy sleeper chair. You're watching some movie on the screen wall in Chris's room. You've been unofficially living here since you were discharged from your own room at the hospital. You spent a couple of nights at you apartment, back when Chris was still in his coma, but it didn't feel right, not being by his side. The staff let you stay, gave you full visitation rights to sleep in the sleeper chair. Some of them knew you had your own occasional follow-up appointments that you had to go to anyway.

Bones came and visited you a lot while Chris was still asleep. He brought a cheesy "Get Well Soon" bouquet and balloon for him, and would spend hours with you when he could, keeping you up to date about Khan's trial and the bureaucracy of rebuilding Star Fleet Academy. You attended the memorial service, held a month after the event. They asked you to speak, but Spock volunteered in your stead. His speech on losing one home was personal and touching, and appropriate, and you think that Uhura must have helped him write it because of how emotional the words were.

You also have to meet with a lot of higher-ups these days, too, about debriefing and rebuilding and what comes next. There was a lot of scandal when Admiral Marcus's crimes were brought out into open light, and you had to spend what you thought was an exuberant amount of time at hearings and trials restating the course of events.

You start to doze off in your chair. It's only eleven o'clock, but you feel comfortable, and warm. Chris is in his chair, parked on your right, between your chair and the bathroom, where he has the most space to swivel if he needs to. You reach out to grab his hand, even though you know he won't feel it. You still like to be there for him. He doesn't notice, his eyes still on the movie. You try to stay up another thirty minutes, but you know that if you fall asleep on him now, Chris will probably be in his chair until two in the morning when the nurses make their next rounds.

"Okay, hotshot. Sorry to tell you, but I'm falling asleep, so let's get you to bed."

He was already bathed and changed with the help of the nurses, so all you have to do is unstrap him and lift him out of his chair and put him on the bed. You arrange the bed, so that it's leaned up enough for Chris to watch the wall screen, and check that his portable ventilator is in order. You leave the miniature scanner on, so that he can still talk through his chair. You know that he sometimes sleep talks that way, and it will wake you up, but you find it reassuring to know that he's dreaming. You have to switch the chair from scanner to manual, though. He accidentally slammed it into the wall last time you left it on, creating a dent in the polymer material. You think it's really funny and sometimes have to giggle when you see it, but the nurses threatened to confiscate the scanner after eleven if it happened again.

_"You kid me a lot,"_ the chair says, morphing the _a_ and _lot_ into one word. It takes you a second to try to figure out what he's saying.

"'Kid you?'" you ask. He does have something of a limited vocabulary, so he might be trying to say something else that the program doesn't know yet.

_"Not kid. Care."_

"Oh, 'baby.' You trying to say you want me to stop babying you?"

_"Noo,"_ the chair holds the _o_ out too long, and you still think it's funny. He also blinks twice. You think it must be engrained in him now, after two months of singular communication.

"Then quit complaining." You kiss him on the cheek, where he has some sense of touch left. His facial paralysis is incomplete, and most of the head and face have some disjointed sensations left, but he has a hard time working any muscles there. "Good night, old man. Love you."

_"Night,"_ the chair tells you. The program doesn't know 'love' yet.


End file.
